For the Time Being

An illustration of Annie Dillard by Alissa Berkhan.

The following is an excerpt from Pg. 166-168 of Annie Dillard's book, For the Time Being.

It is an old idea, that God is not omnipotent. Seven centuries passed since Aquinas wrote that God has power to effect only what is in the nature of things. Leibniz also implied it; working within the "possible world" limits God's doings. Now the notion of God the Semipotent has trickled down to the theologian in the street. The paleontologist in his day called the belief that we suffer at the hands of an omnipotent God "fatal," remember, and indicated only one escape: to recognize that if God allows us both to suffer and to sin, it is "because he cannot here and now cure us and show himself to us"--because we ourselves have not yet evolved enough. Paul Tillich said in the 1940s that "omnipotence" symbolizes Being's power to overcome finitude and anxiety in the long run, while never being able to eliminate them. (Some theologians--Whitehead's school--rescue the old deductive idea of God by asserting that God possesses all good qualities to an absolute degree, therefore he must be absolutely sensitive, and so absolutely vulnerable. They could not have known then that this made God sound like a sensitive new-age guy. At any rate subjecting our partial knowledge of God to rigors of philosophical inquiry is, I think, an absurd, if well-meaning, exercise.)

God is no more blinding people with glaucoma, or testing them with diabetes, or purifying them with spinal pain, or choreographing the seeding of tumor cells through lymph, or fiddling with chromosomes, than he is jimmying floodwaters or pitching tornadoes at town. God is no more cogitating which among us he plans to place here as bird-headed dwarfs or elephant men--or kill by AIDS or kidney failure, heart disease, childhood leukemia, or sudden infant death syndrome--than he is pitching lightning bolts at pedestrians, triggering rock slides, or setting fires. The very least likely things for which God might be responsible are what insurers call "acts of God."

Then what, if anything does he do? If God does not cause everything that happens, does God cause anything that happens? Is God completely out of the loop?

Sometimes God moves loudly, as if spinning to another place like ball lightning. God is oddly, personal; this God knows. Sometimes en route, dazzlingly or dimly, he shows edge of himself to souls who seek him, and the people bear those souls. marvelling, know it, and see the skies carousing around them, and watch cells stream and multiply in green leaves. He does not give as the world gives; he leads invisibly over many years, or he wallops for thirty seconds at a time. He may touch a mind, too, making a loud sound, or a mind may feel the rim of his mind as he nears. Such experiences are gifts to beginners. "Later on," a Hasid master said, "you don't see these things anymore.: (Having seen, people of varying cultures turn--for reasons unknown, and by a mechanism unimaginable--to aiding and serving the afflicted and poor.)

Mostly, God is out of the physical loop. Or the loop is a spinning hole in his side. Simone Weil takes a notion from Rabbi Isaas Luria to acknowledge that God's hands are tied. To create, God did not extend himself but withdrew himself; he humbled and obliterated himself, and left outside himself the domain of necessity, in which he does not intervene. Even in the domain of should, he intervenes only "under certain conditions."

Does God stick a finger in, if only now and then? Does God budge, nudge, hear, twitch, help? Is heaven pliable? Or is praying eudaemonistically--praying for things and events, for rain and healing--delusional? Physicians agree that prayer for healing can work what they routinely call miracles, but of course the mechanism could be autosuggestion. Paul Tillich devoted only two paragraphs in his three-volume systematic theology to prayer. Those two startling paragraphs suggest, without describing, another mechanism. To entreat and to intercede is to transform situations powerfully. God participates in bad conditions here by including them in his being and ultimately overcoming them. True prayer surrenders to God; that willing surrender itself changes the situation a jot or two by adding power which God can use. Since God works in and through existing conditions, I take this to mean that when the situation is close, when your friend might die or might live, then your prayer's surrender can add enough power--mechanism unknown-- to tilt the balance. Though it won't still earthquakes or halt troops, it might quiet cancer or quell pneumonia. For Tillich, God's activity is by no means interference, but instead divine creativity--the ongoing creation of life with all its greatness and danger. I don't know. I don't know beans about God.

Nature works out its complexities. God suffers the world's necessities along with us, and suffers our turning away, and joins us in exile. Christians might add that Christ hangs, as it were, on the cross forever, always incarnate, and always nailed.